WAS case studies
WAS · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The Web Accessibility Specialist (WAS) credential is a professional certification for people who evaluate, design, build, or govern accessible web content. It is aimed at practitioners who already know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and want independent evidence that they can apply accessibility standards to real interfaces rather than recite definitions. The WAS case studies are 5 cases and about 4,009 words.
1The Vendor Iframe in a Standing AA Claim
Northfield University's public accessibility statement, published last term, says the student portal "conforms to WCAG 2.2 Level AA." The portal's course-evaluation step embeds a vendor iframe that 12,400 students must use each term, and evaluations cannot be submitted any other way. The vendor's VPAT marks a dozen criteria "partially supports." Your audit, covering 30 sampled pages plus the whole evaluation process, found a keyboard trap in the iframe's date picker (Escape and Tab both fail), star-rating inputs exposed as unlabeled radio groups, and helper text at 3.1:1 contrast.
763 words, about 4 min2Virtualized Divs, Sortable Headers, and a Grid Proposal
A logistics company's internal shipment dashboard renders 1,200 rows in a div-based table, virtualized so only about 40 rows exist in the DOM at once. Headers are clickable divs.
811 words, about 4 min3Zoom, Sticky Headers, and a Sprint of CSS
A city services site was rebuilt with a sticky header 72 CSS px tall and a slide-out mobile menu. At a 1280×1024 viewport zoomed to 400% - an effective 320 CSS px width - the page scrolls horizontally, the three-column service cards force a minimum width, and tabbing from the browser chrome into the header search box leaves the focus indicator hidden behind the sticky header.
847 words, about 4 min4A Zero-Violation KPI Across Fourteen Teams
A 14-team insurance platform has been told by its new VP of Digital that accessibility will be measured as "zero axe-core violations" by the end of Q3, 90 days away. The first scan reports 9,800 findings, dominated by duplicate component instances: 1,100 color-contrast, 2,300 missing form labels, and 800 image-alt entries, many in legacy PDFs and a shared header.
778 words, about 4 min5The Autocomplete That Announces Everything
A travel booking site's city field is a custom autocomplete: users type into an input, a listbox of up to 8 suggestions appears after a 350 ms debounce, and there are 500 airports. The current code puts role="combobox" on a wrapper div, moves DOM focus into the listbox when it opens, and announces "8 results available" in an aria-live="assertive" region on every keystroke and again on every ArrowDown.
810 words, about 4 min